Glitch ivty-2

The missing street where I grew up. It was there. It was there on that map. It was there in that town.  The one I grew up in. But it isn’t there now. The Holly Lane that I grew up on. We lived at the end of the street and I remember it well. It is the location of the earliest of my lifetime of memories. The ones that remain are vivid and course with life even as they erode into the past. They are etched into the deepest of fissures in my brain.

Well, the other day I took a look on a map. The same map I have used periodically throughout the years to see where it was that I once lived as a very young child. periodically I take out the old paper map from a small box that includes several papers that are useless other than as the totems i periodically rediscover.  I keep them because they remind me to be thankful and respectful to the long journey that I have and must continue to travel.  

I have come a long ways. I am thankful for those travels and the sustenance they provided along my forever journey.

But Holly Lane was no more. Not on that paper map. It was there every year.

Every year when I rediscovered the map in a memento box kept far back in the closet where nostalgia is hidden; when I would gingerly unfold the aging fragile paper so as to prevent it from tearing at the folds; every year I would see the road on the map.  I would follow my finger across the map along an arterial roadway that fed into my first neighborhood. Turn left and up there on the right will be the road.

Except it wasn’t.  Not this time.

I remember crickets and a deep green lawn and running on that lawn. I remember toy tractors, a trike and my first bike; All on that house on that road. The bike was a faded red and was welded back together by my father and was a good first bike. I learned to ride it in gravel. He also built a garage and house addition with my Grandpa.

But it wasn’t on the map. It was no longer there on this paper map.  I wouldn’t have been so concerned had I not found it on a digital map. No, I wouldn’t have shrugged that garbage off.

But this time it was not on an old school analogue equivalent map; a real deal medium. A map that I had carried around with my possessions for decades.

This was troubling.  I was suddenly very aware that I had kept this map all these years as a validation of my prior existence all those years ago on Holly Lane. It had become a totem that served as a validation that the place in which I lived and have my earliest memories existed. And that I, therefore, also, existed. Now I could no longer independently confirm that I previously existed.  I could no longer disprove that I suddenly appeared now, just this moment, with an entire fictional history based on nothing more than a script that was fed into my head.

A surge of adrenaline coursed through my veins at the sudden absence of the validation this ritual had annually provided.

Does the absence of Holly Lane mean the memories of my mother were nothing more than vapors of a memory of delusion of grandeur.  Proof of which I am no longer reliably self aware? My mother once sunbathed in the yard on an early summer day. Or did she? Did the salty home made play dough she made me that tasted nasty never exist?

But the Holly Lane was no longer on that map; leaving me adrift like a lost buoy in the sea; the land of reality leaves me.  

This time Holly Lane was no longer there. Not the street. Not on that paper. It is now gone. 

Does it’s absence mean my earliest memories of self awareness are distortions neither moored nor tethered to a bedrock of reality? That they are some form of fiction? Am I forced to accept the fact that I no longer have a foundation upon to draw upon that explain where I came from? Where I originate?

That road, that one in which I grew up on, the source stream for the river that became my life; it no longer exists on a map of any kind, for I have searched and can no longer locate it.